Remember the “green place” that Imperator Furiosa once called home in Mad Max: Fury Road, the safe haven to which she hopes to return with her friends? In director George Miller’s original notes for the film, which he began planning back in 1997 (!!!), Furiosa’s homeland is referred to as a “GYNOTOPIA.” Yes, in all capital letters.
Although Furiosa began as a nameless “WARRIOR WOMAN,” and the wives began as kidnapped “princesses,” most of the structure presented by Miller’s original notes remained intact in the film’s final product. It’s cool to see how Miller wrote Furiosa as the film’s central figure from the very start; Max doesn’t show up in his notes until well down the page, whereas Furiosa’s story dominates the text. If you want to hear more about this, you might want to pick up Abbie Bernstein’s bestseller, The Art of Mad Max: Fury Road, which catalogues the film’s journey from Miller’s scrawled notes to the big screen.
As for the “gynotopia” part, though, I think it’s telling that Hitfix refers to it as a “feminist utopia” when that’s not necessarily the same concept. Miller’s word choice there reminded me a little bit of how Grant Morrison described his future plans for writing Wonder Woman and the world of Themyscira, especially Morrison’s idea to give Wonder Woman a vagina-shaped plane. It’s charming, in a way, but it’s also undeniably over-simplistic; even the core concept of Themyscira (and Mad Max’s “gynotopia”) reveals the biological essentialist biases of second-wave feminism. It still feels like mainstream media is lagging behind a bit in some ways.
That doesn’t mean I don’t still see the value in what Fury Road has already achieved, though. Margaret Sixel’s editorial work in Fury Road, which I’ve written about before, remains an excellent example of how editing and framing play a key role in the portrayal of women characters. There were a lot of promising aspects to the making of Mad Max: Fury Road, and I can only hope that we’ll see more of that in other big-budget projects as well.
(via Hitfix, image via Tumblr)
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